Search for details on early residents of Emiquon area continues

As water fills Thompson Lake and wildlife returns to the Emiquon flood plain in Fulton County, archaeologists are trying to discover more about the people who once lived there.

Chris Young

As water fills Thompson Lake and wildlife returns to the Emiquon flood plain in Fulton County, archaeologists are trying to discover more about the people who once lived there.

Jason Beverlin of The Nature Conservancy says about 2 billion gallons of water now cover 2,000 acres in the more than 7,000-acre restoration. Fish are thriving, and unusual birds — such as black-necked stilts — are finding the preserve to their liking.

On the loess-capped hills above the lakes and just across Illinois 78/97, American Indians once lived and tried to tap into Emiquon’s bounty.

The flood plain across the river from Havana once supported a pair of backwater lakes and was considered one of the most productive areas on the river for fish and wildlife.

The 7,100-acre Emiquon Preserve was a large farming operation before the conservancy purchased it in 2000. Its two lakes, Thompson and Flag, were cut off from the Illinois River by levees, drained and farmed by the 1920s.

Jodie O’Gorman of Michigan State University is directing excavation of a village site that dates back to A.D. 1300. She is overseeing a dozen undergraduate and two graduate students, along with local volunteers who are patiently sifting through earth looking at everything larger than a pebble.

The excavation is conducted in partnership with nearby Dickson Mounds Museum and Michael Conner, the museum’s curator of archaeology. All findings will reside at Dickson Mounds unless loaned by special permission.

Most of what is known about the site comes from a cemetery that was moved to make way for a road project. Archaeologists from the Illinois Department of Transportation and Dickson Mounds located 280 individuals buried there.

“The story that has been told about the site largely has been told by what was found in the cemetery,” O’Gorman says.

By looking for village home sites, she says, they hope to learn more about the daily life of early people — not just how they died. To that end, parts of three dwellings have been unearthed, as have several storage caches and garbage pits.

She also is interested in learning about two different groups of people that inhabited the site. A group of late Mississippian-period people and Oneota people both occupied the site and researchers want to know if they were there at the same time — and if they got along.

“Did they intermarry?” O’Gorman asks. “What was going on socially?”

One thing scientists know from excavating the burials is that despite Emiquon’s abundance, life remained hard and uncertain.

It also often was violent.

Archaeologists found evidence of scalping, projectile points imbedded in people and signs of dietary stress.

That means it may have been dangerous to wander outside the protective umbrella of the village to tend crops or hunt and gather.

O’Gorman says she wants to determine if a stockade fence was built around the village.

“I don’t know if we are going to find that this year,” she says.

The first year of the dig will wrap up soon, before the summer sun makes it too hot to be out all day. Dickson Mounds and Michigan State have a multi-year agreement to continue the work, and O’Gorman plans to be back next year.

The restoration also is giving scientists a glimpse into why people found the area so enticing.

As a pontoon boat driven by the conservancy’s David Hedrick crossed an expanding Thompson Lake, blue-winged teal, American coots and American egrets took flight. A handful of black-necked stilts, with peculiarly hinged legs, waded in the shallows.
Stilts appear to have knees hinged to bend in the wrong direction. But the joint visible actually is the ankle.

Spooked by the boat, a white-tailed deer splashed through the marshy ground at the edge of the lake.

“I always thought they were a forest animal,” says Hedrick, who retired recently as site superintendent of Lincoln’s New Salem State Historic Site near Petersburg.

“But they seem to love it out here.”

Animal bones, including a white-tailed deer’s toe, are among the remains found at the excavation site. Others found include beaver, mussel shells, fish bones and rodent remains.

“If they are finding fish scales and mussels, you know the Native Americans were coming down here and using this,” Beverlin says.

Nerissa Michaels, a graduate student from Western Illinois University, is monitoring aquatic life at the site for the Illinois Natural History Survey.

“There are tons of bass,” she says. “Schools of 20 to 30.”

She was snorkeling to count fish on Tuesday.

“It’s hard because they follow you for the entire length of your transect,” she says, laughing. “So you have to be careful not to overcount.

“And we’ve seen crazy amounts of duck nests — crazy amounts.”

Beverlin says the developing restoration is astounding even scientists who used computer models to predict how things would go.

“Last year, we had 400 acres of water, and that was cool,” he says. “But this year, we’re getting aquatic vegetation growing in places where no water stood last year.”
Compared to the site’s 2,000 acres of water, Sangchris Lake is 2,321 acres; Lake Springfield is 4,234 acres.

Jubin Cheruvelil, a doctoral candidate and teaching assistant working at the dig high above Thompson Lake, says everything turned up by the dig is examined.